Stabilizing and Scaling an Accessibility Program During Organizational Transition

Client

A Fortune 25 national health insurance payer operating in a highly regulated environment, including Medicare and Medicaid federal contracts.

Engagement Overview

During a period of organizational transition and shifting priorities, the client needed interim leadership support to stabilize and organize their accessibility program. Mantis & Co. was engaged to create operational efficiencies, align executive leadership and practitioners around a shared strategy, and establish an approach to design system accessibility that was both rigorous and approachable.

• Engagement model: Embedded strategic consulting
• Primary sponsor: VP of Experience Design
• Key partners: Executive Director of Design System, Accessibility Team, and Design Leadership
• Design organization: ~120 people
• Accessibility team: Small team struggling to scale and prioritize, often operating reactively

Challenge

When Mantis & Co. joined, the accessibility function was under pressure and operating in an “everything is urgent” mode. Intake requests frequently disrupted planned work, creating a reactive cycle that felt unsustainable for the team and frustrating for partners.

There were also structural and relational gaps:

• Misalignment between executives and practitioners on priorities and what “good” looked like.
• Unclear intake and prioritization, leading to constant context switching and fire drills.
• Friction and mistrust between Design and Accessibility, positioning accessibility as an adversary instead of a partner.
• Misalignment between the Design System team and the Accessibility team, including unclear standards and inconsistent workflows for accessibility in components and patterns.

The program needed an operating model that could reduce chaos, focus effort where it mattered most for disabled users, and rebuild trust across teams — without creating an unrealistic expectation that everything could be fixed at once.

Approach

Mantis & Co. combined program operations expertise with embedded partnership across leadership and individual contributors to shift accessibility from reactive support to a scalable practice.

1. Operational foundation: Intake and prioritization that reduced “everything is urgent”

Mantis & Co. implemented a structured intake process to bring clarity and predictability to incoming requests. This created a shared mechanism for evaluating work, reducing emergency-driven decision making, and enabling the team to plan rather than constantly reset.

2. Decision-making tools: Defect severity framework and prioritization matrix

A key inflection point was introducing program tools that changed how teams made decisions:

• Defect severity framework to ensure the team focused first on the issues most likely to cause serious harm or blockers for users.
• Prioritization matrix to help leaders understand what to tackle first, how to sequence remediation, and how to balance critical defects with longer-horizon usability issues.

This approach also created a clearer separation between:

• Critical issues requiring remediation, and
• Usability and experience barriers that warranted further research with people with disabilities, rather than trying to “solve everything at once.”

3. Strategic alignment: Roadmap with shared language and practical sequencing

To address misalignment across levels, Mantis & Co. delivered a strategic roadmap that established a coherent direction for the accessibility program and a phased plan for execution.

The roadmap included:

• Mission and vision
• Strategic pillars
• Prioritized roadmap that made “what to do first/next” explicit and actionable

This roadmap became a central artifact for aligning executives and individual contributors, and for translating strategy into agile stories owned by the accessibility team.

4. Design system accessibility: A balanced, approachable operating model

Mantis & Co. partnered closely with design system leadership and accessibility stakeholders to solidify a practical approach for accessibility in the design system — clear enough to drive consistency, but pragmatic enough to be adopted.

This work included clarifying standards, improving cross-team workflows, and reducing ambiguity around how accessibility should be built and maintained within components and patterns.

5. Visibility and trust repair: Communication and embedded coaching

To rebuild relationships and reinforce the accessibility team’s value, Mantis & Co. initiated a quarterly communication cadence that gave executives and design leadership consistent visibility into progress. The accessibility team had been doing meaningful work, but it wasn’t being shared in a way that built confidence or momentum.

Alongside program operations, Mantis & Co. also supported growth through coaching and mentorship for individual contributors on the accessibility team — helping strengthen communication, consistency, and program leadership behaviors.

What We Delivered

• Structured intake process to manage incoming accessibility work and reduce emergency-driven churn
• Defect severity framework to prioritize user-impacting issues first
• Prioritization matrix to guide sequencing and tradeoffs across competing demands
• Accessibility strategy and roadmap (mission, vision, pillars, and prioritized plan)
• Improved cross-team workflow and standards clarity between Design System and Accessibility
• Quarterly executive and leadership communications to increase program visibility and alignment
• Embedded coaching and mentorship for accessibility team members and IC growth support

Impact

This engagement shifted accessibility from reactive support toward an operating model built for scale — especially important in a large, regulated organization.

Key outcomes included:

• Faster, clearer decision-making on what to do first and what could wait
• Reduced time spent debating priorities, enabling more time spent executing
• Improved relationships and trust between Design and Accessibility, positioning accessibility as a partner rather than an adversary
• Stronger alignment across executives and practitioners through shared strategy and roadmap artifacts
• Greater visibility of accessibility progress through a repeatable communication cadence
• Accessibility team members reported that the structure and roadmap made the work feel more owned, more strategic, and more sustainable

Design leadership described the work as invaluable in getting the program pointed in the right direction — particularly through the roadmap, which created clarity on sequencing and helped translate priorities into owned delivery work.

Why It Worked

• It addressed both systems and relationships: operations reduced chaos, and trust-building reduced friction.
• It created shared language and artifacts executives and practitioners could rally around.
• It prioritized work based on impact to disabled users, without pretending everything could or should be fixed at once.
• It balanced rigor with practicality — especially in the design system — so teams could adopt changes without being overwhelmed.